Top Five eDiscovery Technologies to Watch in 2012

Over the past 12 months I have had the unique opportunity to seek out and review over 100 eDiscovery technologies.  As a result, I have had the pleasure of being exposed to some exciting new technologies that will have a disruptive impact on the eDiscovery market in the second half of 2012.

With over 100 technologies to choose from, culling the list down was not an easy task.  Therefore, I had to rely upon some amount objective criteria such as platform technology stack and supported environments along with a heavy dose of my subjective opinion in regards to how disruptive a technology could be within the paradigm shift of the eDiscovery market.

The objective, more technical criteria was easy.  At least in regards to 4 of my 5 choices.  The subjective criteria was a bit more complicated as I took into consideration criteria such as pricing, positioning, deployment flexibility, management team and uniqueness.

Following are my choices for the Top Five eDiscovery Technologies to Watch in 2012:


BeyondRecognition, BeyondRecognition

Optical Character Recognition (OCR), a foundational technology for litigation services and eDiscovery hasn't changed much in 30 years.  And, vendors really haven't worked on making it more accurate or added any significant new bells and whistles.  Therefore, after I had the opportunity to spend some time with John Martin from BeyondRecognition and review his new glyph based image processing technology designed to replace OCR and more, it was an easy decision to rank Beyond Recognition as the technology that will have the most disruptive impact on the eDiscovery market in the second half of 2012.

With character and word identification and conversion accuracy at 99.5%+, single instance character and word correction, Logical Document Determination (LDD), document type classification, duplication document detection, database field indexing and a cloud based scalable architecture that can process terabytes of data per day, BeyondRecognition will most definitely have a disruptive impact on the eDiscovery market and any other markets that require large volumes of text based materials to be processed and coded.  For more information about BeyondRecognition, please visit: http://www.beyondrecognition.net/BeyondRecognition,_LLC/Overview.html.


X1 Social Discovery, X1 Discovery

With the rapid proliferation of social media, I predict there are going to be very few eDiscovery and Information Governance projects going forward that don't include potential evidence from social media sources such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.  Therefore, I included X1 Social Discovery™ from X1 Discovery as one of my top five eDiscovery technologies to watch in 2012.

X1 Social Discovery™ is the industry's first investigative solution specifically designed to enable eDiscovery and computer forensics professionals to effectively address social media content and web content, in one single interface. X1 Social Discovery™  provides for a powerful platform to collect, authenticate, search, review and produce electronically stored information (ESI) from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other web sources.  For more information about X1 Social Discovery™ , please visit: http://x1discovery.com/social_discovery.html.



X1 Rapid Discovery, X1 Discovery

With the accelerating volume of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) in the cloud, I predict there are going to be more and more eDiscovery and Information Governance projects going forward that require potential evidence to be extracted from the cloud and possibly even processed in the cloud.  Therefore, I included X1 Rapid Discovery™ from X1 Discovery as one of my top five eDiscovery technologies to watch in 2012.

With X1 Rapid Discovery™, organizations can quickly access, search, triage and collect their data in their existing cloud environments, without having to first export that data; thereby transforming how organizations address the challenges of search, collection and analysis of cloud-based data. While other eDiscovery products require migrating or even shipping data to the vendor tools, X1 Rapid Discovery™  is a hardware-independent software solution that uniquely installs and operates on demand where your data currently resides. For more information about X1 Rapid Discovery™ , please visit:  http://x1discovery.com/rapid_discovery.html.


TunnelVision, Mindseye Solutions

The Early Case Assessment (ECA) tool landscape has changed dramatically over the past 12 months.  New tools that cover a larger percentage of the EDRM model and are built upon newer more flexible technologies have emerged with aggressive new pricing models. Therefore, I included TunnelVision from Mindseye Solutions, a representative of those new ECA platforms, as one of my top five eDiscovery technologies to watch in 2012. 

TunnelVision was purpose-built by long time eDiscovery industry experts to address the challenges that organizations are facing when supporting eDiscovery and Information Governance. The technology is a simple yet flexible platform, designed to scale, and delivers full transparency. TunnelVision carries a predictable cost model and helps in managing risk, identifying exposure, and eliminating wasted time throughout the process. For more information about TunnelVision from Mindseye, please visit: http://www.mindseyesolutions.com/.


Equivio Zoom, Equivio

Predictive coding or Technology Assisted Review (TAR) has captured the imagination of the industry in the first half of 2012.  As such, I wanted to include predictive coding technology in my list of top five eDiscovery technologies to watch in 2012 and therefore I chose Equivio Zoom from Equivio.

Equivio develops text analysis software for eDiscovery. Users include the DoJ, the FTC, KPMG, Deloitte, plus hundreds of law firms and corporations. Equivio offers Zoom, an integrated web platform for analytics and predictive coding. Zoom organizes collections of documents in meaningful ways. So you can zoom right in and find out what’s interesting, notable and unique. For more information about Equivio Zoom from Equivio, please visit: http://www.equivio.com/.


Summary and Comments

With over 100 technologies to choose from, culling the list down was not an easy task.  Therefore, I had to rely upon some amount objective criteria such as platform technology stack and supported environments along with a heavy dose of my subjective opinion in regards to how disruptive a technology could be within the paradigm shift of the eDiscovery market. BeyondRecognition, X1 Social Discovery, X1 Rapid Discovery,  TunnelVision and Equivio Zoom definitely met these criteria.

It will be interesting to review my list of Top Five eDiscovery Technologies to Watch in 2012 this time next year when I choose another list.  Some on the 2012 list will have had a big impact and some will not.  However, one thing is for sure, each of these technologies represents a major step forward for litigation and eDiscovery technology.


Additional Product Reviews

Over the coming weeks, I will be posting additional product reviews for each of the technologies listed in the eDSG Top Five eDiscovery Technologies to Watch in 2012.

Labels: Cloud Computing, Early Case Assessment, ECA, eDiscovery, Legal, Litigation, OCR, Optical Character Recognition, Social Media

posted by Charles Skamser @ 4:21 PM